News from developers

Chief Web Engineer

Hello to everyone who loves to shoot an alien or two! Neuronhaze company warmly congratulates you with the upcoming holidays and wishes you all kind of success, both in games and in the real life. And we want to share the details on our current work on the Project Genom with all who miss the news already.

Locations
To begin with, we would like to announce that the works on the Harbinger location are complete. We have updated the details and materials for all shops, passages, transport parkings, warehouses and other ship areas which are now waiting for the players. In the future, some small changes will be made to particular places like adding vending machines and signs, as well as you will be able to participate in the opening of the "Lame Moth" strip club.

More recently, we have announced that the game world is increased up to 100 square kilometers. We did so not only because we rework the network part but because we have desire to make the game even better. The old location was abundant in various natural zones yet was too straight and obvious, and when the transport was added it has become clearer that its size is rather too modest. The renewed Avalon will soon be able to please you not only with the beautiful graphics, vast open spaces and new quests, but also with the performance improved through the load balancing. Now beginners won't have to hang around with the veterans, performing different tasks in one tiny area of the planet, and Quads will become even more valuable.

At this point we begin to upgrade all old Avalon zones, starting with the most basic upgrades designed to significantly improve the gameplay and make the game more intense and mature, and ending with the new elements of the game environment.

NPC
When we updated the game to the latest version of Unreal Engine 4.14, we received new shading opportunities and understood that some reflection features have changed. This allowed us to significantly improve the visual component of the character skin and hair shaders. It also resulted in remaking the NPC faces, as their triangularity sometimes made the eyes bleed in the past. As well as, we improved the clothing materials to correspond with the overall quality.

When working on the new character faces, we immediately made facial animation possible for every resident of Avalon. This option has been successfully tested and will be added as the project develops, but it is safe to say that one day the faces of your heroes and the NPCs will come to life.

Another important feature that you will be able to find in the game very soon is the NPC day and night cycle. The updated locations of the planet will gradually come to life in the daytime, the NPCs will start to move around and go about their business. At dusk, many NPC will go home to rest. This doesn't mean that at night the world will die out, no. At night we will have a completely different life — new NPCs, new quests, special events and opportunities, as well as a unique fauna species, will be waiting for you under the cold stars of Avalon.

Map
When Genom veterans read about the game world expansion and the NPC movement, they will certainly grab their chests. Everyone still has vivid memories of no map marks and how maps were confusing and didn't coincide with anything, and to find the quest NPC you had to look round every corner and turn every stone for hours. By popular demand, we paid special attention to these issues, and as the result, we decided to create a full-fledged 3D map of the locations.

This will able maps to be updated as the world grows, to keep track of everything, even the moving marks, clearly indicate the number of stories in buildings and at the same look as closely to the game world as possible.

Interface
The character abilities extension is not far off, and the closer we get to this moment, the more significant is the attention we have to pay to the game interface. We've made a lot of work to revise almost all game windows. Sometimes these changes were minor, and sometimes the windows have been changed completely. The HUD has also been totally with your wishes and critical remarks taken into account. The interface has become easier to use and more responsive to changes in display aspect ratio and resolution. Now we have no display cutoffs or elements shown over other elements, and we've reached the maximum readability of the information.

Quests
Some serious improvements have also been made to the game quests. We've added some new interesting quests and reworked the existing ones. You will have more obvious and logical decisions, meaningful conversations, new unusual tasks, greater interactivity. We've tried to add up as many dynamics in the game as possible and remove useless running between NPCs wherever we could.

Software Part
The most complicated and extensive, the most important and critical part of the work is in progress. Very soon we will have the first closed beta testing of the new network architecture. In addition to increasing the network stability and eliminating lags, the new software part of the project is designed to eradicate all flaws of the old version, from the inconvenience of the radio using to the inability to throw the object out from the inventory. After successful testing, we will move on to the next stage, expanding the game possibilities and adding all the mechanics you can see in the official trailer.

Social Life
We dive into the project development, yet sometimes poke our heads and tear our eyes from the displays to observe the events happening in the world and the industry. Many of you have already noticed that Project Genom took part in a couple of contests taking place, and even managed to vote for the game. Those who missed this news, small but very important for the project, can still participate and vote for Project Genom (or help our competitors =D)

One of the competitions is held at http://event.mmosite.com/gameprize, where we, thanks to your support, have already managed to enter the Top 8 and compete with the gaming industry giants we madly respect. The 2nd round stays open until Jan 4, 2016, and we'll be pleased and grateful if you vote for Project Genom.

The second competition to which we were invited by the organizers is Ukrainian Game Award that will be held at the GameDev Conference 2017. The qualifying first stage of the competition voting will be held from Dec 28, 2016, to Jan 12, 2017, at the conference website http://gamedev.lviv.ua/project-genom-uga2017.Holiday Discounts!
In addition to the interesting competitions, we are glad to inform you that Steam has allowed us to take part in the annual Steam Winter Sale, and you will be able to help Project Genom development buying the game and all addons at a discount of 30%! If you haven't made up your mind, we remind you that the project is in its alpha version. If it's important for you to get a full game and enjoy it to the full, we strongly recommend you to wait until the beta test or the project release not purchasing any early access kits now.

Neuronhaze team once again sincerely thanks every member of our wonderful community and each tester separately and congratulates everyone with the upcoming holidays. With you, this year was as bright and fast as a flash and marked a new life to the project! Thank you and see you soon on Avalon. Let's make Genom together!

Inquisitive

Another important feature that you will be able to find in the game very soon is the NPC day and night cycle. The updated locations of the planet will gradually come to life in the daytime, the NPCs will start to move around and go about their business. At dusk, many NPC will go home to rest. This doesn't mean that at night the world will die out, no. At night we will have a completely different life — new NPCs, new quests, special events and opportunities, as well as a unique fauna species, will be waiting for you under the cold stars of Avalon.

Phazon Clan Leader

This will definitely be a huge upgrade to the game all together; Merry Christmas devs!
News - January 5, 2017

"The new year has come with new challenges and goals that we must achieve. Main news with proofs will be a little bit later, but for now I will share some information that may be interesting to you: - It was decided to rework a quest line in the location "Dump". We know that the quest line in this location was too boring and dull and we (in the person of our screenwriter) will try to change and revive it a bit . - A great job on the new NPCs been made. In addition to a completely new quality of "texture", we also implemented a system that allows us to make the NPC more vivid. Actually this is the first version of the character's facial expressions (this mocap recorded the face mimics of our animator, oops. Do keep in mind that this is just a demonstration that facial expression of this quality is possible. The quality and such will surely be improved. smooches for the win - The project is international and the plot and lore of the game implies that there were the representatives of various nationalities and races in the Ark. So, we are preparing a number of the NPCs of nationalities previously not represented. - It was agreed that in the near future we will add a glider in addition to ATV (the work on quad's mechanics is almost completed and soon it will be in operative condition). Collection of data about these vehicles will help us to implement other vehicles already with measured phisics, balance and parameters.

PS: Let me remind you that the official update will be released in the first quarter of 2017. But we will do our best to make it happen as soon as possible. Once again, Happy New Year!"
BAGAMUT - game designer

Inquisitive

Heh, those pictures look good!
Just started playing yesterday, but I'm already enjoying the game. Looking forward to the update, especially the HUD-part, looks like a huge improvement
Keep up the work, this game will be awesome!

Inquisitive

I just hope you guys do something about quests, I have so many quests and I don't know how to complete them, just need more details or quest points on the map. The main quest is OK, but side quests are almost impossible to finish